Trailer Tuesday: Shame (2011)

Shame is the second feature film from visual artist Steve McQueen, and like his previous work, Hunger, it is visceral and mesmerizing.

Set in Manhattan, the film follows Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a 30-something corporate executive, as he struggles with sex addiction. He has casual encounters with women he meets on the streets, hardcore sex with prostitutes and masturbates to double-anal videos he stores on his hard drive at work.

Though the NC-17 film is rife with sex—in full-frontal detail—there is little pleasure in it. Instead, Shame captures what it’s really like to live with sex addiction: Brandon is devastatingly lonely and emotionally shut off from the world. That is, until his chartreuse sister (Carey Mulligan) comes to live with him, further complicating his life and exposing his shame.

Actually the Autocorrect wasn’t the culprit. ‘Chartreuse’ was right. The actual error was that he just credited the wrong actor: the sister’s actually played by Kermit the Frog in a rare cross dressing attempt to nab the Tootsie vote for next years Best Actress Oscar. Don’t judge him. It’s not easy being green…

Assuming they’ve changed their gender-specific admission standards, perhaps she is one of the two Carthusian monks that know the secret recipe to what I recall as being a thoroughly intoxicating elixir.

Some people just gotta use stilted or antiquated language, like the way newspapers have to use “tembler” every time there’s an earthquake, or some sports writers have to use “cagers” and “tankers” and “pugilists” to avoid repeating the more common words like basketball players, swimmers (?) and boxers. Sometimes it’s better to repeat the common word than use a startling archaic synonym.

Not imperceptible. I know what “chanteuse” means (as well as chartreuse), but the word choice here seemed aesthetically displeasing. My bad, it’s just a stylistic choice, and I’m guilty of forgetting YMMV.

I noticed while still a lad that newspapers invariably use the word “temblor” second in the body text. “MASSIVE QUAKE STRIKES ATLANTIS” would be the headline. Then the story goes, “A devastating earthquake struck the mythical sea-colony of Atlantis Thursday afternoon. The temblor registered 9.8 on the Richter scale, and is thought to be attributable to the flatulence of the slumbering deity Poseidon, who has demonstrated a hunger for refried beans this week.”

Not once in my life have I seen the word “temblor” used in any other context but the second sentence in a news release, and believe you me, for thirty plus years, I’ve been looking.

I really wish people would stop using the term “sex addiction”. There’s no such thing. This character may have compulsive sexual behaviors, but he certainly doesn’t have a sex “addiction”. Sexual compulsive behaviors are not addictions, they don’t act like addictions, and they aren’t treated like addictions.

Bah, what am I saying? Since when has the movie industry ever cared about accuracy? :P

read up on evolutionary psychology and you’ll see why Teufelaffe is right. Anything else is just pop culture with a touch of hysteria. we need to be careful about referring people to these sites that are not peer reviewed.

So, if you’re rich enough to buy sex, or smooth enough to get it for free pretty frequently, you’re a sex addict. The rest are just poor schlubs who jerk off a lot? Or are at least not as interesting to make a movie or tv show about.

Of course not, but there’s a limited amount of human suffering that I’m able to absorb and empathize with and prefer to save that empathy for, oh, I don’t know, the human trafficked prostitutes this rich guy is fucking. For example. It’s like Up in the Air. Remember? Where we were supposed to feel sorry for the guy getting paid millions to go around firing everyone? Fuck. That.

It’s about contentment vs. a false need. Addictions set off chemical changes in the brain that cause you to want. Whatever it is, you want it, and when you get it it’s not enough so the next time you want more of it. So whether it’s sex or money or food or heroin or whatever, a lot of people have lost the ability to be content. It’s something that has to be re-learned.

So. pjk, it isn’t about the money. There are plenty of rich people out there who have learned contentment and share what they have. Peterblue11, it isn’t about the sex. There are plenty of people out there that have amazing sex with a loving partner and are content. There are also those without either who are content, and those without that are not content and may develop the same problems given the opportunity.

If we are to feel sorry for anyone it’s those who have forgotten or have never learned to be content, and the people they hurt trying to fill whatever hole they feel they have to fill.

I understand all that and it’s all true. My point was that if I’m going to spend my time empathizing with suffering, this particular kind of suffering of this particular person seems pretty far down on the global scale – actually even on the American scale – of suffering. I’m not saying all movies should be about deadly serious suffering, but if you’re going to make a movie that PURPORTS to be about deadly serious suffering, it better damn well be deadly and serious, because God knows there’s plenty out there. Instead, lots of (most?) American movies and books tend to pass off upper-middle class worries and stresses and Stuff My Therapist Told Me as worthy of high art about the human condition. It’s American decadence at its finest. Obviously Mr. McQueen is free to make whatever kind of movie he wants, but if you want to make a movie about sex addiction, why not make it about a father of three from Staten Island? I mean, Requiem for a Dream isn’t a perfect movie, but at least it’s not about some i-banker addicted to blow.

Serious Movies show sex as being dreary and unerotic. (Cf: Shortbus.) If a movie shows sex as being, you know, fun and pleasurable, then it’s nasty porn. The most important thing, apparently, is to make sure that any Serious Movie about sex is as unerotic and unarousing as possible.

Can you imagine this in any other genre? Comedy: “Well, you see, the thing that is important about my movie is that it is actually not funny at all.” Action adventure: “The thing that makes my movie artistic is that no one will actually be thrilled by it at any point.”

If someone actually thinks that making a movie with lots of skin that is “about sex addiction” is a brave new artistic statement, they have just awoken from cryogenic suspension since 1952.

This preview is clearly failing at selling a ‘Serious Movie’ then… Because all I could think was that if most one-night-stands looked like that, I’d have sought them out a lot more in my single years ;)

What?! Really? Sure, there is some unconfortable/funny/weird sex in Shortbus. There were also some scenes that were incredibly hot. & It was all real sex/& penetration, too.
Sounds pretty true to life to me.
I really thought that was the point of the movie – you can show real sex & not have it be Porn.

I dunno. The guy singing The Star-Spangled Banner into another guy’s ass was a moment of high hilarity for me. There was plenty of despair and alienation in that movie, sure, but I also thought I saw heaps of hope and sweetness there, too. I’ll have to watch it again. I loved that movie, and I don’t remember it being a downer in the end.

Case in point, the french movie “Stories of sex”, directed by a former porn actress and which was given an X rating in France, effectively killing any chance of it ever turning a profit. Because, you see, as it featured fun and hot sex scenes it was considered porn. Whereas a Breillat movie, displaying the same amount of sex, does so in a tormented and moralizing way, hence the “artistic” label and the NC-17 rating.

Sounds like an upscale version of this thing in my Netflix queue:
I Am a Sex Addict

In this provocative autobiographical tale, filmmaker Caveh Zahedi uses an unconventional mix of home movies, candid confessionals, reenactments and animation to chronicle his long struggle with sex addiction.